Life in Memory
by Ellipsis Black
Summary: A Malfoy reflects on his past mistakes and tries to come to terms with them.


****

Life in Memory

By Ellipsis Black  
Rating: PG-13  
Disclaimer: Not mine. *sigh*  
Warning: Angst/adult scenes, sexual references, obsessive behaviour.  
Pairing: Malfoy/Potter (it gets pretty obvious pretty quickly)   
Summary: Malfoy reflects on his past mistakes and tries to come to terms with them. 

~~~~~

He clenched the letter in nerveless hands, crumpling it into a ball. 

It was all meaningless, except for one line—less. Three words, to be exact.

__

Potter and I, he had written.

__

Potter and I... 

How could he write that? Write it like it meant nothing, like it was just a game! 

Fleeting remembrances of a boy with messy black hair and glasses running through the halls of Hogwarts surrounded by Gryffindors... 

He stood up and made his way to the door. Malfoys don't cry. Down a long hall, the pictures in their gilded frames taking on new life and seeming to play out a pantomime before him. 

A hand of friendship ignored, a boy cornered in the hallway, confronted, challenged. A disdainful refusal. 

He tried to turn his mind from the memories flooding him but it was too late, they overwhelmed him. 

__

Potter and I... 

They had met on the first day of school. He was in fifth year, Potter in first. He had sensed something different about Potter. Something sublime. Potter had sensed something in him, too. The darkness. 

The sorting sealed it. He was in Slytherin; Potter went to Gryffindor. 

The sorting should have sealed it, at least. But Potter was impossible to avoid. Every time he saw Potter he was tortured by his imagination. By Potter's second year, they both played Seeker and every time he saw Potter on a broom he was engulfed by images of Potter riding something else, his pale brown skin rising into the darkness. The Gryffindor was impossible to ignore. 

Then one day it happened, as had been inevitable from the first. 

After a Quiddich match, he had been walking back to Hogwarts alone, unaccompanied by his usual cronies. Potter had come up beside him, also alone. They had walked in silence, and he could feel the dam holding back his need cracking along one fault-line after another. His control broke and he slammed Potter up against a wall, attacking the Gryffindor's lips with his own. And Potter hadn't resisted, had seemed eager, for all his inexperience and youth. It was only a matter of time; they found themselves in an abandoned room in the Astronomy Tower. 

Images of his white hands framing the planes of Potter's chest, Potter's hands wound through his hair. Sinuous movements, clouds of steam rising like ghosts of old enmities from the writhing bodies. Black hair brushing his stomach and warmth engulfing him. Red, swollen lips meeting his again. 

It was madness and vanity, doomed to failure, but he hadn't seen that then. All he had seen was the warm body above him, or under him. The slanted cheekbones, the almond-shaped eyes. The pointed chin with a little cleft in the centre. The hard planes of stomach and abdomen. He had been blinded by beauty in a paradise of passion and warmth. 

Jump ahead. Potter in the hallway. _I think we should end it_. End the passion? End the love? End the nights of secrets shared between two minds? 

__

I'm in love with someone else. Could she love you as I do? Could she be as devoted to you as I could? I could give you everything you dreamed of and all I ask in return is your devotion. 

__

I love her, I'm sorry. And you don't love me. 

But I love you. 

How can you do this to me? Why didn't you give me warning? It's your fault I'm in such pain, Potter. 

Pain is a weak emotion. 

Malfoys don't have weaknesses. 

Running away down the hallway, tears burning the edges of his eyes. 

__

I'll never cry again. Crying is a weakness. 

A broken promise. He wept bitterly. 

__

I'll never cry again. Crying is a weakness. 

Malfoys never cry. 

He walked along yet another corridor and down a flight of stairs. 

It was a well-worn path, one he walked often, late at night. Down into the dungeons. He knew the Ministry of Magic believed there to be a secret room full of dark arts devices hidden down there; they'd be shocked at the truth. There was a torture chamber, one designed specifically for him. 

He opened the door to his own personal hell, shoving the crumpled letter into a box of letters and then retrieving it and throwing it on the floor. 

He faced the room finally, bravely. his own personal, secret hell. From every wall, posters and photos stared back at him, all of a boy with messy black hair and glasses. In some of them, a pale, grey eyed boy also stared sulkily out of the picture. Tables lined the walls, cluttered with paraphernalia. Various chests spilled papers onto the wood of the tables. A couple of bottles of male cologne sat together. One was almost empty. In one corner, a pensieve rested and in another a small, teardrop shaped grass phial hung from the ceiling. Inside the phial a few drops of blood hung suspended. Below it hung a few strands of hair. Black hair. 

He went over to the pensieve. In it were stored all his memories of the laughing Gryffindor boy. Even those he preferred to forget, like the day his anger turned to hatred. 

He had gone to Potter's wedding. Angry and hurt, he had sat in the back row in his black suit and not attended the reception. All through the ceremony he had been forced to watch Potter turn that dazzling smile, the lovers' smile on someone else. That night he had a secret meeting with a hooded figure. 

By morning his arm bore a tattoo of a skull with a snake coming out of its mouth. 

A month later he had married a girl he had picked out of the crowd for her beauty, just to prove he could, hoping that Potter would feel some measure of the pain he had felt. 

Potter, by then a man, had not been invited to his wedding. 

Other, more pleasant memories. 

Their violent fights which always ended in his submission, and then the rough, passionate satisfaction of a lithe, beloved body in his arms. 

The laughter as they kept their secret from the students and teachers, running off to deserted rooms in the Astronomy Tower to conduct their affair. That very secrecy now meant that he was the sole custodian of the truth and it would die with him. 

And one memory he had never had the courage to face. 

He had questioned Peter Pettigrew in the name of his lord and discovered the location of the Potter residence. After divulging this information to the lord, he traveled there himself, knowing that Potter would die and knowing that he was the only one who could save the lover of his childhood. He had intended to warn Potter. 

But he had stood, and he had stared in the window at the Potters loving little family; Mother, Father and the baby. He thought of his own young son. They would have gone through school together, he had thought with a shock. 

Then he had turned and walked away. 

And so, Potter had died. In a flash of sickly green light and with a shouted incantation, any hope of reconciliation had died. When he could have stopped it, he hadn't. And he had died then too, along with the black haired boy of the laughing almond eyes. Along with all the things he needed to say to that other and along with the apology that stood unsaid between them. 

And he lived as a shell, functioning, but unable to give affection or feel any emotion except an endless cacophony of guilt, anger, despair and longing until at last all he felt was cold. Quietly, he did his penance for his sin. He maintained this room with all the letters between them, the bottles of Potter's cologne, the pensieve and the little glass phial with Potter's blood and Potter's hair. 

His son was so much like him. He had been drawn to Potter and now he could see the same cycle beginning again. The perpetuation of the Malfoy curse. 

Malfoys don't cry. Malfoys don't have weaknesses. 

Malfoys don't forgive. 

'I love you,' the sound was weak, hoarse. As if it had never been said before. And it echoed back at him, mocking. 


End file.
